Social media and Ikorodu cocaine bust
18 May 2023 |
2:03 am
There is an ongoing social media conspiracy theory regarding the September 19, 2022 drums of cocaine, weighing over 2.1 tonnes and valued at more than N200 billion in street value, seized by the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency ...
NDLEA
SIR: There is an ongoing social media conspiracy theory regarding the September 19, 2022 drums of cocaine, weighing over 2.1 tonnes and valued at more than N200 billion in street value, seized by the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) in a residential estate in the Ikorodu area of Lagos.
One cannot but be troubled at times seeing the rate at which misinformation and disinformation spread on the Internet. I came across some series of social media posts ranging from attempts to link persons, who are not suspects in the drug bust, to outright falsehood that all the drug exhibits seized had been burnt by the Agency purportedly to destroy evidence needed to prosecute the case.
My simple search on Google puts a lie to all of those narratives and the only conclusion I could draw was that, indeed, there must have been some deliberate attempt by the netizens to spew those lies obviously for political reasons.
One would expect that at any given instance, a social media user that is neither representing nor quoting any credible source, or a known media house, would at least carry out some sort of basic research on Google.
And what is there to find on the internet’s super highway storage cloud? Tonnes of information, sequentially arranged to give a kindergarten pupil clear and precise history on what happened, how it happened, and where to verify any missing link.
On this matter, a Google search reveals that on September 18, 2022 in Lagos State, the NDLEA officers carried out a two-day simultaneous operation in a concluding part of a four years drug dealing investigations with part intelligence provided by the US-DEA, which led to a cocaine warehouse bust in the Ikorodu area.
Considering the massive efforts the NDLEA has put into its line of duty to get the Ikorodu cocaine warehouse bust case charged to court and the chronological records available in the public domain through the media, I do not see any reason for the conspiracy theory I was seeing online recently.
Agbontaen Okogun wrote from Benin City, Edo State.
I did not foresee any case of corpus-delicti, contamination or spoliation of the evidence in convicting the five defendants in the matter. Though this particular case is considered a major cocaine seizure in the history of the NDLEA, it is not particularly the first.
We should not forget about the pending cocaine deal trial of the suspended DCP Abba Kyari before the Federal High Court in Maitama Abuja; a water tight case that is under the vigilant eyes of the NDLEA leadership.
Naturally, a case that is before a competent court of law shouldn’t have been a matter for internet trolls in their conspiracy theory. This should be considered a joke taken too far in the first place, putting into cognisance the efforts the Buba Marwa leadership has put in place to reposition the NDLEA into a world class anti-narcotic agency.
My take is that people should uphold the tenets of imbibing integrity in what they post, like, retweet, and share on the internet. We should deliberately strive towards fighting against fake news, disinformation, and misinformation.
In doing this, we naturally help to bring back sanity to our social media spaces and society, and of course, this will demonstrate our desire to maintain peace for the national unity we seek as a nation. To internet trolls, it is clear to me that these people are likely to be verified nonentities. Either way, they all need to read this and put a stop to the smear. A popular saying states that “wisdom is profitable to direct,” but in my view, I will say intelligence and comprehension are beneficial to possess.
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